Argument by wreckage

They've been telling us Big Government is a failure for years and now they're going to make it so.

©2009 U.S. Marine Corps

I endorse Jeb Lund in general, but I direct you to his most recent Truthdig column not only to enjoy its all-around excellence but because I want to build on something he’s talking about — the special stupidity of Trump stopping the EPA’s Energy Star program, known to most Americans as an easy and useful way to see, via clearly-designed labels, how energy-efficient appliances are in the store, and to then make their own calculations as to whether to spend more on the product to spend less on power.

Lund weighs some conceivable traditional explanations for this lunacy; he sees, for example, how “electric utility owners” might get some benefit from killing Energy Star. But it’s not cut and dried. While such entities’ political donations lean Republican, utilities in blue states like PG&E and Dominion lean Democratic, and they all seem to donate strategically. (After the election a few of them bribed Trump, I mean donated to his inauguration.) “On the other side of the equation,” Lund says…

…are the chamber of commerce, home construction and people who make basically everything electrical about your house. It’s tough to see what benefits Trump draws from pandering to the [utilities] at the expense of the other conservative constituencies and all the conservative consumers they sell to.

Because, despite the MAGA movement’s animating principle of self-defeating spite, there is no consumer-level constituency who wants their household appliances to do what they currently do, only more expensively.

Lund talks a bit about how this new policy lines up or doesn’t with GOP SOP, and allows for possible factors like the specific lunacy of Trump (“it could also be that this is happening because of some fever dream the Big Man had — an imbalanced Whirlpool dryer wobbling away from the wall and rattling like Marley’s chains…”) and the general lunacy of his wrecking crew (“a bunch of guys who could get in a head-on collision driving the go-karts at Disney World ruining things for reasons that can’t even be stitched together by racism and insane greed…”). But I have another idea.

I subscribe to the popular general theory that while this administration is dominated by the rampaging id of Tubby, its ideological engine — its ego, so to speak — resides in creeps and freaks like Russell Vought, Chris Rufo, and Stephen Miller. One thing that doesn’t get discussed much is how these two constituencies — one intellectual, in a manner of speaking, the other mostly brain-dead — came together.

One connection would be the moneymen like Musk and Thiel who promote self-dealing authoritarian ideas similar to those of the Trump brain trust. But what does Trump know or care about their ideas, beyond that they’re attached to dollars? He could easily take their money (and Thiel’s protégé as Vice-President) and then ignore them. as it has been suggested he is doing with Musk, while continuing to kick back to them massive patronage, which is something Trump actually understands.

I’ve mentioned before what the basic political appeal of “President Scumbag” is — punitive, vicious, revanchist etc. The willful destruction is at least emotionally what his voters asked for. The fact that some of them have already been burned by it, face-eating-leopards style, is amusing — never more so, to my mind, as when he told Sarah Huckabee and other Republican governors that No More FEMA meant them too.

But it also shows that Trump was not merely rewarding friends and punishing enemies — with the exception of his rich friends (and using “friends” very loosely), Tubby will deny anyone the benefits of good government if he can (and as we have seen he very expansively defines what he can do).

Whether it’s because he’s term-limited or because he intends to rule as a dictator, Trump isn’t worried about pleasing even his own voters — which, if he had an interest in ideology, you’d expect him to do at least to create proof of concept that his politics were not only successful but also vindicated. If he really believed in MAGA, he’d at least want his voters to feel America becoming Great Again. But polls show the opposite is the case.

You may think what Trump’s doing doesn’t make sense, even on his own terms, and that maybe he’s just nuts. But you know who’s in favor of what he’s doing, spreading this misery around? Vought, Rufo, and all those guys.

As the investigations of Project 2025 showed, these people are not into Givin’ ‘Em What They Want. They continually denied during the campaign that they were using P2025 because they knew it was unpopular, and they intended to use Tubby’s circus act to put it over on the rubes.

As I said, Trump’s not an ideologue. He doesn’t know what ideology is. He has grudges and vendettas and is happy to use the power of his office to indulge them, and that’s it. But there is one area of overlap between him and the brain trust.

It has been noted that Trump is stuck in the past — mostly the 1980s — and that his resentments are pretty much the same as those of any chunk-headed consumer of rightwing media and talk radio from that era, because that’s what he’d been watching and listening to back before his brain calcified. And the big message then, even bigger than justification of racism and misogyny (which, to be honest, you could get in slightly diluted form from most media), was that Big Government is the enemy.

Now, if Trump were an ideologue, you’d expect on this account for him to at least talk a lot about, say, cutting the deficit. He has made noises about that at times, though not convincingly and clearly because Mike Johnson prodded him. But the deficit is not what Trump, nor anyone else who marinated as long as he did in those old conservative messages, meant by Big Government.

They — he — meant pointy-heads and desk jockeys and guys with slide rules taking over and making decisions that should be left to ordinary Americans (or at least their bosses). Big Government was deciding what to do with your money. They were foisting cars on you that had safety features and anti-pollution devices and mileage standards that Joe Sixpack never asked for. They protected stupid animals like the snail darter from their richly-deserved extinction — and you know that money the so-called scientists spent on those stupid studies was coming out of your paycheck!

And so on. Trump and the millions of little Trumps out there internalize the message and applied it to everything. They loved big box stores, for example, and saw their success as proof that Big Business was way more efficient than Big Government — without ever grasping that government handouts were a huge reason why the stores were able to succeed in the first place. (They felt the same way about the internet.)

But while they were nurturing this grievance, something else was going on: Big Government was actually making people’s lives better. The air was cleaner; so was the water. International trade, guided by the strong hand of government, meant a lot of the stuff they bought, like clothes and furniture, was cheaper. And government regulation was keeping people from getting ripped off too much, except where Republican officials were able to make carve-outs, as with the payday lending industry.

In short, Big Government wasn’t so bad. You might, if you thought about it enough, come up with a better way to balance government and private interests, and I’m sure many of you would. But not many people have the time or training for that; most just passively enjoyed the blessings, including those who could never admit it to themselves.

The conservative movement is, as I have said many times, a death cult, but over the years it has also been home to a number of well-educated and absolutely bonkers political thinkers — actual ideologues — and their number one idée fixe (besides “white men must rule,” but they usually don’t say that one out loud) has been that Big Government is the enemy. Their understanding of this concept has more shadings and sub-clauses than the dumb version Trump and his fellow talk radio addicts carry around, and I bet they cringe a bit when Tubby yammers out his gauche version and their friends and family look at them like “is that what you support?” But it’s basically the same thing.

And you can bet that however Tubby may embarrass them, they’re delighted that, unlike previous Republican leaders who lost their anti-government nerve when their ratings fell and performed such heresies as tax raising and Medicare Part D, they finally have someone in office who is so devoted to the anti-Big-Government cause that he’ll wreck everything the government actually does well — environmental protection, consumer advocacy, public health, air traffic control, etc. Their dream is that, thanks to the failure and inertia of our system, he will succeed well enough that government will be permanently crippled, unable to do anything except issue proclamations and build statues while billionaires rape the land. And then they will finally be able to say without fear of contradiction that they have been right.